Lately there’s been a ton of press around massive open online courses. MOOCs are a “tsunami,” a “seismic shift“; the New York Times says 2012 is the “year of the MOOC.” People are right to be excited. But why? Much of the recent coverage focuses on numbers: the dozens of top-shelf universities putting their professors online through Coursera, the 160,000 students who enrolled in Udacity’s Artificial Intelligence course, the 100,000+ students who signed up for Harvard’s first edX courses…. Read more